In Uzbekistan, speculation swirls as Karimov out of sight

In the most tightly controlled countries, the media is told
what they are allowed to report on and what topics are taboo. Anything related to
the leader's health or his family is generally in the latter category. The
resulting information vacuum can lead to rumors and uncertainty.

Last summer, for example, Ethiopian
citizens and international media were left
wondering about the well-being of then-Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who
disappeared from the public eye for weeks. With a severely decimated
independent press and the government's unwillingness to comment on the issue, the
country and the Internet were filled with unsubstantiated reports that Zenawi
was hospitalized or even dead. (After two months of secrecy, the government
finally announced his death in August, but gave no detail about the nature of
his illness).

A similar frenzy of speculation is now underway in Uzbekistan,
where the 75-year-old authoritarian leader Islam Karimov has not been seen in
public for a week.

According to news
reports, an exiled opposition party, the People's Movement of Uzbekistan, said
last week that the aging Karimov had suffered a heart attack and is
immobilized. Citing their own sources in Tashkent, Russian and Kazakh media have
reported that Karimov was hospitalized shortly after he attended the televised
official celebration on March 19 of Nowruz, the Persian New Year. The
independent news website Respublikasaid the recent
return to Uzbekistan of Karimov's youngest daughter, Lola Karimova, from her
home in Switzerland brought further questions about his well-being.

As in Ethiopia, state-controlled media in Uzbekistan are
keeping silent on the matter, and authorities will not officially deny or
confirm the allegations, the exiled Uzbek news website Uznews reported. One semi-official
denial came from a Twitter
post by Karimov's eldest daughter, Gulnara Karimova, who dismissed the
allegations and noted that her father was publicly seen dancing at the Nowruz
ceremony. Karimova did not address, however, what has happened to him since.

Whether the reports are just rumors or reflect a precarious
state of Karimov's health, the lack of clear-cut information exposes the dire
state of press freedom in the country. Reporting on the confusion today, Reuters
noted that "information from Uzbekistan is hard to come by as some news organizations,
including Reuters, were barred from reporting inside the country after a bloody
crackdown on protests in the eastern city of Andizhan in 2005."

Barring sudden, significant improvements in the deeply
frozen media climate, both citizens and foreign diplomats will have to wait
and wonder who, exactly, is running Uzbekistan.

Muzaffar Suleymanov, research associate for CPJ's Europe and Central Asia Program, has a master’s degree in international peace studies from the U.N. University for Peace in San Jose, Costa Rica.